Monday, 18 April 2011

I’m able to place, with quite some precision, where my first voyage around Kendrick Smithyman collapsed. Somewhere between “Flying to Palmerston” and “Research Project”, I gave up: my copy of Peter Simpson’s Selected Poems has a spine all broken and detached up to this point and then, beyond, is untouched and elegantly new. Smithyman, in my first encounter, was too difficult, too obscure, too demanding to count as what I considered real poetry. (In those stupid judgements I wasn’t alone; my copy is marked, as almost all my teenage purchases are, with the tell-tale vivid of the remainders sale upstairs at Dunedin’s UBS). The further Smithyman travelled from his early ‘contaminations’ – Auden, of course, Dylan Thomas, alas – the less his work fitted into my own sense of what poetry should be and what it should do. These weren’t, in other words, poems which shouted at me things I already believed, the demand, it seems to me now, of most latter-day Romanticism.

Re-discovering Smithyman some years later as a gauche and homesick student at the Baillieu Library in Melbourne, all those supposed vices had transformed themselves into virtues. Smithyman was worth the wait. Here was a poet at once intellectually absorbing and emotionally engaging, lyrically deft and formally inventive, and, above all, demanding, and with a fine ear and sense for what demands were needed.

We were/are all of usAlienated. That’s how we belong.He was deaf, deafened by such a distance –

out there, if you took a firm lineYou’d fetch no landfall untilChile. Think of that now! afterAn afternoon at an old German pub downriver,Pub and museum of a folk.

This was their cargo’s way,crooked as a founder’s motives.The distance which you swallow at a gulp –it was their distance.

The detailed carefulness of “[t]hat’s how we belong” sticks with me, as does Smithyman’s commitment to a poetics capable of wit and mischievous humour while all the while recognising the complexity and difficulty of material produced in the New Zealand social formation. As he argued in Poetry Yearbook (1954):

Society is complex in its activities and its relationships, and the members of a community are complex. A section of the poetry of and advanced and intricated community must inevitably be complex, and because complex, obscure – which is not to say that most of the obscurity cannot eventually be understood in the major part. …

We have to reckon in short that the mirror which art holds to nature may be a dark glass reflecting a paddock where undoubtedly dark horses are capering.

It’s fitting, given the first gaps in my Smithyman experiences, that I’ve had to live through another, shorter, one on my way to encountering Scott Hamilton’s exciting selection of unpublished Smithyman poems, Private Bestiary. The first print run of this selection sold out very quickly – unusual, surely, for a poetry collection – and it was some months between my order and the book actually arriving here in Wellington. It’s worth the wait again.

Surely there isa moral in those sandhillsif I had wit enough to tell it.

These “first steps into a private bestiary” (there are supposedly hundreds of uncollected Smithyman poems and drafts in his archives) is enormous fun: the poems themselves are beautiful – and often strikingly surprising – and the introduction and notes helpful and provocative. (Those who know the Reading the Maps blog will recognise the house style: erudite, engaging and engaged, witty, occasionally rambling).

Private Bestiary builds the case, already present in Peter Simpson’s selection, for reading Smithyman not as a self-consciously ‘difficult’ poet aiming for obscurity, but instead as another example of the Wordsworthian model of “a man speaking to men”, communicating about issues and themes of great difficulty, to be sure, but never in a needlessly off-putting or sterile manner. The great theme Private Bestiary selects and presents is the recognition that “there is / a rabid violence / in the earliest stories,” the violence of colonial settlement and expropriation.

This recognition is accompanied by an essential counter-tradition, the only way it can be given useful life: Smithyman’s poems – and it took the introduction and notes to bring this fully alive for me – are packed with the details of working-class Pakeha and Maori rebellion, the Red Feds, rebel unionism, unofficial history. There’s little pleasure here for liberal guilt or piousness; plenty of material to provoke the ‘rumour of another history.’

There is difficulty in these poems, though, but it’s worth learning to seek in that difficulty the source of their pleasure. Smithyman’s formal experiments; his densely allusive world of private reference and location; his word-plays and asides building to a sense of menacing over-reading and excessive signification: all of these, I recognise now, are part of a pattern and artful design in the work – the source of the stimulation – instead of a flaws in pieces which could be perfected by a little lyrical smoothing out and simplifying. The broken, improvisational associations and asides of the poems in Private Bestiary point somewhere.

The strain here, and its symptom, an occasional obscurity, is History itself:

But whatever portion of this faculty we may suppose even the greatest Poet to possess, there cannot be a doubt that the language which it will suggest to him, must often, in liveliness and truth, fall short of that which is uttered by men in real life, under the actual pressure of those passions, certain shadows of which the Poet thus produces, or feels to be produced, in himself.

That language of real life, in the poems selected here, stresses both the dishonesty of Pakeha myths of origin, the anxious elimination of colonial history from our minds (“We are a myth of our making”) and its insistent presence, coupled sometimes with other social orders about, in this piece from 1965, to erupt:

A view of our circumstance is narrowed: this side, unreal safety.Down in the valley men console in a thoroughly public bar.

*****

The other, compelling, case made in Private Bestiary is for Smithyman as regionalist. The Northland Smithyman loved so much may as well be a foreign country to me, so different are its signals in botanical detail, historical reference and climate from my own stock of South Island memories and affiliations.

That sense of regional detail and particularity is useful, though: there’s nothing like an alienation effect or two to force the re-thinking of important issues.

Yesterday afternoon, having made some of these notes earlier in the morning, I went to the premiere of Operation 8, a very important documentary about the “anti-terror raids” from 2007. I won’t write here about the politics of that particular – and ongoing – event, except to make the minimal observation that it represents a particularly shocking and disturbing injustice and assault on civil and political rights.

What struck me, amidst all the horrifying details of police maliciousness and media and Labour government connivance and complicity, was the ignorance so essential to the whole story’s success. There are the telling details of throw-away ignorance, to be sure – notably here the inability of most journalists covering the case to learn Tame Iti’s name – but a deeper, structural racism and ignorance (what might be glossed, following Smithyman, as provincialism against regionalism) sustained the entire media and police fantasy of a terrorist plot in New Zealand.

Time and again in the documentary people from Ngai Tuhoe being interviewed made reference to earlier land seizures, to sovereignty never ceded, to confiscation, struggle and resistance. They had a coherent, and detailed, narrative, reaching back to Rua Kenana, the 1860s East Cape wars, and further still. Each of them articulated demands for self-determination, and placed their own (extremely trying) current situation in an historical context of racism and oppression. Against this, the wildness and extremity of the Dominion Post’s coverage – and of the vocabulary from Bush’s “war on terror” translated into the New Zealand context – sounded maliciously fanciful and bizarre. The narrative those Tuhoe campaigners took for granted, though, was one which, I imagine, many viewers would have struggled to recognise, still less comprehend. National stories submerge the recalcitrant details of resistance.

The Ureweras are the site of plenty of Pakeha projection and fear, and those caught up in the October raids are the latest victims of that paranoia and its historical background. There’s important and detailed historical work – Judith Binney’s massive history, most obviously – which counters this, but something of the distortions of a nationally-minded pose remain.

Smithyman’s work reminds us of the ideological fictions which make up the imagined community “New Zealand”, of the regional specificity of so many of our struggles and campaigns, of the patchy – and often inconclusive – process of colonisation, of the presence of historical injustice pressing upon the present:

One thing for sure, Turuki isn’t going to ride through here again; he’s been deada while since, somewhere over behind Ohiwa.Things aren’t better than they were?No way. No way at all.

Friday, 1 April 2011

Everyone knows it yetIt’s not on the mapIt’s not on the map soIt’s not JapanIt’s not Japan soIt might as well vanishIt doesn’t matter soWe do as we please

(Kim Si-Jong, “Ikaino Poems”, 1975)

Translation opens us to other worlds, certainly, but it can also perpetuate exclusions. The first time I read Yu Miri’s Goldrush its Zainichi context was lost on me, neither surname nor Pachinko-parlour setting, at that time, setting off any of the appropriate cultural cues amidst my own ignorance and confusion. It’s hard to image what Stephen Synder in his (excellent) translation could have done to make this context more apparent, without resorting to those cumbersome notes and appendages which signpost what’s supposed to work unsigned, and, besides, the blithely arrogant under-reading of that initial experience (“aren’t I multicultural, one of those rare folk who consume literary fiction in translation!”) may well mirror broader patterns of Zainichi invisibility and exclusion.

Yu herself, anyway, refuses the label of “Zainichi writer” just as assertively as her Korean surname reminds Japanese-language readers of her own inescapable insertion into social ways of inscribing ethnicity and attendant racial oppression, and her darkly humorous, exacting stories can be read for their unsettling and probing observations on heterosexuality and sexual oppression or the nuclear family and violence as much as for any insight into Korean experience. Yu’s achievement, Lisa Yoneyama argues of Fullhouse, is to “probe for clues with which to disturb” the “problematic arrangements” of the modern family. Far from denying the importance of the Korean struggle, though, for Yoneyama – and I think she’s right – writing of this kind “can be disconcerting and threatening to those who desire to maintain the stabilized boundaries of family, ethnic community, and national polity and history, for they reveal and criticize the mutual imbrications of racism and bourgeois family values.”

It’s been quite a few years since I spent time being productively disconcerted by Yu’s writing, but I’ve gone back to her these last weeks after engaging with the scholarship of Sonia Ryang. A displaced intellectual and powerful writer, Ryang is an engagingly precise and provocative guide to the complexities of the situation for Koreans in Japan, and her scholarship – a model of lucidity, engagement and sheer intellectual excitement – stirs up all manner of questions official politics would prefer left unanswered.

Zainichi, in the usual liberal phrase, are described as “second class citizens” in the Japanese system: Ryang polemicises against the complacency behind this common-place. Zainichi are, of course, not citizens of any kind, second-class or otherwise, and part of their oppression stems from their systematic exclusion from all parts of Japanese political and social life. To be Zainichi is, Ryang suggests, to be reduced the quality Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life”, invisible, outside the rules and governing possibilities of the political world.

Besides, what is it to be Zainichi? We’re so used to talking about Chongryon-affiliated people as “North Koreans in Japan” that it takes the shock of Ryang stating the obvious to re-focus discussion: there are no North Koreans in Japan; Japan does not recognise the DPRK, and there are no official channels for DPRK citizenship, outside of diplomatic circles, to be maintained abroad.

DPRK-affiliated Zainichi are, then, doubly invisible. Mainstream anthropology, as Ryang points out, in framing most of its studies of Zainichi as studies of ‘outsiders’ in Japan, perpetuates this disenfranchisement. When considered from within, as a diaspora without homeland, the political priority and possibilities for Zainichi seem rather different.

There’s very little attention given, in media reports and elsewhere, to the historical complexity of the situation which led to their being ‘North Koreans’ in Japan: in insisting on this complexity, Ryang turns it to usefully activist and anti-racist ends. If most studies of diaspora look at the outsiders, what about turning attention to the host societies?

A society such as Japan that firmly stands on the belief in its monoethnicity might be unfit to be a host society for modern diasporas. I state this with a certain urgency: it is public knowledge that since 9/17, North Korea has been roundly demonised and Chongryun-affiliated Koreans marginalised and isolated. The current situation creates constraints not just on the diasporic community but on Japanese society as well (Ryang, “Visible and Vulnerable: the Predicament of Koreans in Japan”, 79)

***

The Zainichi struggle is, though, as anyone who knows the grubby history of Chongryon will be aware, not just a matter of exposing the lies and racism of the ruling order: it’s also a question of questioning, and opposing, stifling nationalisms and orthodoxies within the community itself.

Ryang takes the question of naming – the honmyo (true, Korean, name) and tsumei (‘passing’, Japanese, name) – and subjects this site of so much well-meaning, or not so well-meaning, dogmatism to useful interrogation:

It is all very well to condemn passing names as the legacy of colonialism. But as long as there exists strong discrimination against Koreans in Japan – whose mark is most clearly discerned by name rather than skin colour or accent, for example – the use of a name is no simple matter. When a subject prefers a particular name – no matter how compromising such a deployment may be in the eyes of the nationalist orthodoxy – how can others (ethnic community leaders, teachers, parents, or even the nation-state or history) force them to use another name? Whether a Korean name is honmyo for an individual is not a given, since otherwise it would be tantamount to assuming that one’s alien registration name has to be one’s real name. After all, who decides which name is true to the person? The law? The community? Parents? Teachers? Or the person herself? Rather than assuming that the “true self” exists in “true Korean names”, we should withhold conclusions about the authenticity of names. (Ryang, “Introduction, 14).

It’s not just the insistence on complexity which is inspiring; Ryang insists on individual agency and the capacity to struggle.

The very ambiguity of the question of names for Zainichi points to some of the political possibilities of the position they inhabit. Issuing ‘anthems from nowhere’, residents of the imaginary country which, in the words of footballer Jong Tae Sae, is “another country in Japan”, Zainichi, in their very in-between status, defy the nationalisms which disfigure the region:

More recently, as the association with either North or South has waned, the term zainichi, meaning “existing in Japan”, has become common currency for representing Koreans in Japan. This name does not come without problems, in my view. To begin with, the term is parodic; it inverts the reality of the treatment of Koreans by the Japanese state. In this system, Koreans are treated as outsiders and their exclusion is justified on the basis of that they do not have Japanese nationality. By calling them zainichi, as if they merely “exist” in Japan, the name obscures their clear disenfranchisement. Although calling oneself zainichi chosenjin or zainichi kankokujin no longer denotes exclusive association with either the northern or the southern regime, the contours of zainichi life are becoming more complex and volatile. The parody name zainichi condenses this complexity: in spite of the diversity of names for Koreans in Japan, not one captures them properly. (Ryang, “Introduction”, 11).

This condensed complexity inspires anti-racist organising and activism, from Zainichi groups in the United States to Tokyo.

There’s plenty in Ryang’s thought I disagree with: her writing consistently down-plays the importance of the struggle aspect of class struggle, and accedes too easily, perhaps, at times, to claims of Zainichi invisibility which in turn erase their obvious contribution, and importance, in Japanese working-class politics. (For an example of this, see her brilliantly argued but, to my mind, one-sided piece “The De-Nationalised Have No Class” in Japan Focus.)

It’s unusual, though, to encounter academic writing which combines accessibility and political urgency and intensity with carefulness and rigour. Now, while the humanities are under such sustainedattack, her work stands out as an example of the sort of practice I want to take up and defend.

Sources

I’ve quoted from two collections here:

Sonia Ryang and John Lie (eds.), Diaspora Without Homeland: Being Korean in Japan (Berkley: University of California Press, 2009).

Lisa Yoneyama’s essay is in Koreans in Japan. The Kim Si-jong quote is taken from Melissa Wender’s article in the same volume. Ryang has also published a number of other very useful books; one I’ve found particularly helpful is North Koreans in Japan : language, ideology, and identity (Boulder, Colo. : Westview Press, 1997).

With thanks to Shomi, who introduced me to Yu Miri's writing, and whose 2005 conference presentation started me thinking about translation in the Zainichi context.